Spin
The favorable interpretation of events supplied by the people they concern: the press secretary explaining why a defeat was a victory, the company statement that calls a recall a commitment to quality. Persuasion by framing rather than by falsehood, and the everyday trade of political communication.
The word is from ball games, where spin changes where a ball goes without changing its speed, and it entered politics in the United States in the 1980s. "Spin doctor" appeared in a New York Times editorial in October 1984, describing the aides who worked the press room after a presidential debate to tell reporters who had won. The term stuck because it named something everyone could see and nobody had a word for.
Spin is rarely a lie. Its material is selection and emphasis: which facts are mentioned first, which comparison is offered, which word is used for the thing that happened. On this site it is the Framing and omission family in daily use: Frame Control, Burying The Lede, Euphemism, Minimization, and the Half Truth. The spin doctor's skill is to supply the frame before anyone else does, because the first frame is the one that sticks.
Because spin is expected, it is partly discounted, and its practitioners know it. The techniques that work best for them are the ones that look like something else: the Planted Question, the Leak And Plant, the independent-seeming voice who turns out to have been briefed. Spin that is recognized as spin has mostly failed.
Sources
- Safire, William. Safire's Political Dictionary. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0195343342
- Ewen, Stuart. PR! A Social History of Spin. New York: Basic Books, 1996. ISBN 978-0465061792